Jets owner Woody Johnson strongly disagrees with the unnamed player who called quarterback Mark Sanchez lazy.
“I’ve never heard that,” Johnson said on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, via the New York Daily News. “He’s the first guy in the building every morning and the last guy to leave. So, the last thing he is is lazy. . . . He’s an NFL quarterback. That’s what you expect from an NFL quarterback.”
Johnson said he thinks the 2011 team never built the locker room chemistry that it needed, and he wonders whether that all started with the NFL lockout, which kept the team apart during the offseason and led the Jets to have training camp at their practice facility in Florham Park, New Jersey, rather than at the State University of New York at Cortland.
“Inside the locker room is one of those things that every year is a little different,” Johnson said. “Thirty percent new players. The fact that we didn’t go to Cortland maybe hurt us. . . . Every team didn’t have an offseason. So maybe it hurt us a little more than some others.”
Johnson said he thinks everyone associated with the team has good reason to be frustrated.
“New Yorkers don’t like losers,” Johnson said. “Even if it’s an 8-8 record, that’s not good enough. They want a winner. And there is frustration. And that’s what you want.”
But Johnson doesn’t want that frustration to spill over into attacks on Sanchez, who still has the owner’s public support.